Understanding mood and engagement with digital OOH in malls

Why shopping mall research?

Shopping is one of the most popular pastimes in the UK, and by virtue of the captive audience in an appropriate mindset it is the environment in which all mainstream advertisers want to be seen.

According to TGI Touchpoints, in 2010 82% of British adults visited a mall and the average adult visits a small shopping centre or mall once every three weeks.

Kinetic’s mission is to better understand consumer behaviour on the move, in order to optimise OOH media planning, to achieve greater accountability for advertisers and gain insight into the performance of digital Out of Home (OOH) campaigns.

Clear Channel has invested in an extensive estate of high quality digital screens in malls, and in line with its strong commitment to research and insight and in particular its work in understanding the emotional response to outdoor advertising, was keen to undertake a study in the mall environment.

Kinetic and Clear Channel worked together to plan a long-term project in malls, involving new technology and surveys.

Wave 1 - a commuter town mall

The first stage of our research project began in January 2010, with the objective of assessing how impactful digital advertising was in Westfield’s Royal Victoria Place shopping mall in Tunbridge Wells, a commuter town venue ranked 44^th in the UK, with footfall of around 200,000 per week.

Using technology from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute we set up a face-tracking camera on top of a Clear Channel digital billboard. This would identify gender, approximate age and basic engagement data as well as expression mood ratings of happy, sad, impassive and alert.

The algorithm was trained to recognise age, gender and mood using thousands of test faces. When the software found a pair of eyes looking at the panel, it gathered the whole face based on that locked-on pair of eyes.

It then tried to match the face against what it had previously been told a happy or unhappy, old or young, male or female person looks like.

Ad engagement - who, when and for how long?

In three weeks, the technology gathered almost half a million individual glances. From that we could tell that the number of contacts appeared to reflect peak shopping times, suggesting predisposition to see the advertising and that lunchtimes and Saturdays are significantly busier times in a commuter town shopping environment.

Contacts per shopper peaked at lunchtime during the week, but much earlier at the weekend, tailing off as time pressures increased and people were in more of a hurry.

However, crucially people looked for three times longer at the weekend, showing a greater depth of engagement than weekdays, averaging four seconds - Postar defines a conscious engagement as 0.24 seconds.

The technology measured engagement time in seconds per shopper, and we found that the impact of the ads was 3.5 times longer at the weekend - on a Saturday, total engagement time was around 400,000 seconds while over one week it hit one million seconds, or 16,000 minutes.

Audiences aged 16-24 were more engaged than older people, looking for an average of 2.4 seconds compared to 1.2 seconds for 45-54 year olds.

Average duration per age group

Source: Kinetic/Clear Channel

When analysed by gender, we saw men were more engaged on Monday and Saturday and women on Wednesday and Thursday, reflecting the mid-week "me-time" nature of female mall shopping, and a more task-focused emphasis on Saturdays.

Striking the right balance between animation and static

In order to provide comprehensive feedback to our clients about the effectiveness of their digital campaigns we also monitored the impact of different levels of animation and video in ads.

Our key finding was that animation offers a clear impact benefit over static ads, with a 9% uplift seen on average.

However, the rule does not apply that the more movement the better. Limited and bespoke animation was found to be more engaging than video, proving ads tailored to their environment are significantly more impactful than TV ads or videos being played out to the OOH audience.

There was also a difference in the responses to levels of animation according to gender: among men, animated artwork increased total contacts by 14% compared to static, while with women the difference was only 9%. 

Unsurprisingly shoppers appear happy in the mall environment. The most common expression was contentment, followed by alertness. 

Wave 2 - a 'destination' mall

 The research in Tunbridge Wells succeeded in answering all the questions we had about digital OOH in a medium sized shopping mall environment, but we were soon keen to repeat the exercise in a larger mall that would be visited by people looking for more from the experience, such as a cinema, restaurants and bars, allowing us to assess how people’s mindsets differed while visiting a destination mall.

In August we repeated the study in Westfield Merry Hill, a mall in the Midlands that is ranked in the top five in the UK and has an average footfall of 462,000 per week.

Again we used a face-tracking camera from the Fraunhofer Institute, but this time with advanced technology that allowed the camera to recognise faces, so discounting repeat views within a fixed time period.

Youth targeting was key

We used predominantly youth-orientated ad messages. Whereas in the previous study the billboard was showing ads aimed at a broad target audience, such as Lloyds, Amex and Surf, in the second wave it was showing creatives from the likes of H&M, Blackberry Messenger (BBM), Warner Brothers and T-Mobile.

What we found was an engaged audience whose contacts increased throughout the day, as they were able to shop and eat at the mall later into the day, countering our observations in the smaller mall that was part of a town centre.

There also appeared to be no significant difference in the level of engagement on weekdays and weekends at Merry Hill.

Average contacts per day

Source: Kinetic/Clear Channel

Monday was the quietest day in the mall but between Tuesday and Friday our ads were seen by an average of 22,000 people every day and over the weekend.

Crucially, given the nature of the ads under test, younger people were still engaged for the longest, proving that engagement duration is influenced by the demographic targets of the ads.

The targeted strategy resulted in 81% of the screen’s contacts coming from people aged 25 and under, up from 70% in January’s project.

Here, the average contact time for 16-24s was 5.8 seconds, driven by the youth-focused ads, significantly higher than the 2.4 seconds seen in the earlier study.

Average duration per age group

Source: Kinetic/Clear Channel

How do age and gender affect mood?

 Again, shoppers were found to be generally happy in this mall environment, but here visitors appeared to be in a slightly more net positive state, driven by alertness.

Overall extent faces matched expression

Source: Kinetic/Clear Channel

Younger groups seemed most positive in this environment while females are the happiest gender, with a feelgood factor score of over 36, while men clocked 29.5.

The levels of engagement with advertisements that used animation or moving text or video were specifically monitored and our learnings for the second wave of research were largely the same as those from wave one.

Animated creative attracted more attention over static creatives, with the best example generating 24% more attention, showing that increasing degrees of animation improve a brand’s likelihood to be seen.

Take away – what we know now

 The Merry Hill Digital Malls study not only reinforced some of our earlier findings but also provided fresh insights into a different segment of mall user, and a different type of mall. 

Consistently, the mall environment presents itself as an increasingly important platform, offering an invaluable opportunity to target audiences in a positive and engaged mindset.

Studies exploring the importance of emotional response to advertising suggest that relaxed and happier shoppers tend to remember brands and brand messages more, and that this can lead to better business results for brands. 

Furthermore, work by Keller Fay and others suggests that outdoor advertising can be a strong trigger for word of mouth. 

The relaxed and sociable environment of the mall, in proximity to so many retail outlets and leisure facilities, is the perfect place for positive brand communication.

This research method is not exclusive to the mall environment.  In 2011 we hope to take the face-tracking technology out into other markets and environments to further explore the most effective ways to reach people outside the home and on the move.

Nick Mawditt, global director of insight and marketing, Kinetic